MARION, Ohio — The final leg of Vice President Joe Biden’s three-day swing through Ohio
contained some new material almost anyone could appreciate — including Republicans.

The GOP loves it when Biden confuses the state he’s speaking in, which happened briefly
yesterday in front of 1,500 at Harding High School.

“I mean, literally, ladies and gentlemen, this is the guy who’s running all the ads here in Iowa
saying he’s going to get tough on China,” Biden said inadvertently as he criticized Mitt
Romney.

For what it’s worth, there is a Marion, Iowa — a long way from Marion, Ohio, where President
Barack Obama and Biden lost Marion County with 44 percent of the vote in 2008.

Biden’s speech capped off a half-week in Ohio speaking to 5,150 people at rallies where he was
the headliner, and to 9,500 when he appeared on Tuesday with Obama at a park in Dayton.

In a blistering critique that was focused on economic policy, Biden said Romney “talks about how
proud of his record he is in Massachusetts. You notice, he’s not even competing in
Massachusetts.

“So much for how much the people of Massachusetts love Mitt Romney,” he said.

Things are muchtighter in Ohio, considered a tossup state where most polls show Obama with a
narrow lead. Obama will be in Cleveland tonight, while the Republican ticket kicked off a four-day
Ohio blitz that includes three stops for Romney today — one at Worthington Industries in
Columbus.

The Romney campaign declined to comment on Biden’s speech — arguing his message was the same
from earlier in the week — but Republicans widely panned him on Twitter for the Ohio-Iowa
mix-up.

Biden went to extended lengths to portray Romney-Ryan economic policies as being overly
beneficial for the wealthy. Using the time-honored cliche “if it looks like a duck, walks like a
duck,” Biden said of the GOP ticket’s tax and budget policies: “Man, this is one quacking
duck."

When a baby cried out during a quieter moment in Biden’s speech, he said, “I don’t blame that
baby for crying; you know what, she just realized what it means if Romney gets elected.

The crowd included 700 students, school officials said. Marion Harding has about 1,000 students
and they were given a choice — they could attend the rally, go home or stay in a different part of
the school and do work.

Biden stayed at a Hampton Inn in Springfield on Tuesday night. According to a White House pool
report, he met a guest who’d been staying there since Sept. 17 because her house burned down.

The woman, Minnie Bethel, 58, said Biden “made me feel like he was a regular man and not some
dignitary that thinks they’re better than us.”

During a stop yesterday morning at Castle’s Country Restaurant in Mechanicsburg, Biden called
his daughter Ashley over as he was mingling with patrons.

“They have her with me the last two weeks to keep me from making mistakes,” Biden said of Ashley
Biden, 31, who introduced her dad at his Ohio campaign stops.